1. Field of the Invention
The field of the present invention relates in general to a system and method for structured computing and communications. More particularly, the field of the invention relates to a system and method for deferred resolution of hypertext links and of pointers of similar effect in a networked communication environment.
2. Background
The Internet, and the world wide web in particular, is becoming increasingly popular as a means for providing a wide variety of information and services to end users on demand. In addition, web pages are also being used on private intranets to provide services and information within a company or other organization. In such networks, users typically access information using software known as a web browser. In order to retrieve information from the network, the browser asserts the address of the information onto the network encoded in a Uniform Resource Locator or URL. The URL contains a specification of the protocol being used, the server upon which the information is located, and the path file name to the desired information within the file system of the server. For web pages, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used to request the information. The selected HTTP server then retrieves the information and returns it over the network to the browser or other HTTP client. This scheme defines a web.
Information in these webs is typically arranged into pages that are displayed by the browser. The pages may include a combination of text and multimedia information (such as graphics and sound). Some of the information on the page such as images, icons or highlighted text may also function as tags. A tag represents a link (referred to as a hypertext link) to additional information that may be obtained from the same or other servers on the network. The page supplied by the server (typically as an .HTML file) provides both the information for displaying the tag (e.g., an icon) as well as an associated URL which is not displayed to the user. When the tag is selected by a user, the browser asserts the URL for the requested information. Importantly, the user does not need to be aware of the particular URL, but rather has only to request the desired information by selecting the appropriate tag. The process of retrieving web pages and then following hypertext links to related information is often referred to as web browsing. A relatively simple scripting language called HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is commonly used to define the contents of a web page. By merely specifying the data contents and tags for a page in HTML and loading that information onto a server, a web page can be easily created.
Web pages are being used for a wide variety of purposes. Among other things, publications may be displayed through web pages. References to sources of information, related articles, images and other information may be embedded in the text of the publication as tags (which may be displayed, for example, as highlighted text). These tags allow users to select and view related information merely by selecting the appropriate tag.
In some respects, however, web browsing is a disadvantageous way of presenting traditionally-structured media such as newspapers and magazines, in part because either (a) hypertext links to external material (such as references) are interruptive of such media, and (b) when such links are introduced they may lead to departure from the context of a particular structured publication, perhaps never to return. Consequently, it would be an improvement to provide, within the scope of web browsing, a method for selecting external links of interest, while deferring the act of following such links until the reader has completed browsing within the format and context of the particular organized publication. Similarly, nontraditionally-structured media presented as web pages may in some cases benefit from the availability of the same method of deferring links until some suitable time. For instance, it may be desirable to view a web page (which may represent a newspaper article) and select various tags of interest (such as tags which represent links to information on the people mentioned in the article). Rather than immediately jumping to web pages discussing the various people, however, it may be desirable to finish the newspaper article first and then have the choice of following one or more of the selected tags. Similarly the same capability may be beneficially applied to advertising and ordering products or services. Preferably, such deferred resolution of hypertext links may be implemented using a structured computation and communications system and method that can be readily adapted to other environments and new media. In addition, it is desirable to provide methods for specifying pages other than HTML, and pointers of similar effect as hypertext links.